VOIP monitor advice please

Question

We are using Cisco CUOM/CUSSM to monitor our call manager infrastructure.

We are using Orion for the data network.

So far CUOM has been more than a little difficult and unrealiable to use for our purposes.

It does an awful lot of great stuff. but i find it clunky and very confusing.

Would VOIP monitor do the same job?

I know that we'd have to use IP sla from the routers. Which should not be a problem.

But Cisco CUOM monitors real calls and Voip monitor is just generating test calls?

Any advice would be great as we are pretty much stuck with cisco  unless

we can explain why Solarwinds would do the same job easier.

Thanks

Sam

macnugetz · Answer

Thanks for the additional detail, menz.  Just a couple of comments... first, we'll continue to focus on service quality as we develop IP SLA, which already addresses some of the things you've listed.  It's not likely that we will implement anything around phone inventory.  Also, you mention syslog and traps; this is something Orion NPM does today.

One more question, of the functionality you listed, are you actually using all of that?

Thanks again for the information.

menz · Answer

We need a tool to provide details of call loads, any call issues, Problems with the CUCM environment.

CUOM provides great details of call quality/loads/jitters/latency mos values. It has the ability to see

in great detail every detail the CUCM infrastructure.

Here is the cisco blurb:

Contextual diagnostic tools:

–
Diagnostic tests provide performance and connectivity details about different elements of the converged IP communications infrastructure.

–Synthetic tests replicate end-user activity and verify gateway availability and other configuration and operational aspects of the IP communications infrastructure.

–
IP service-level agreement (IP SLA)-based diagnostic tests can measure the performance of WAN links and node-to-node network quality.

–Phone status tests use IP SLA to monitor the reachability of key phones in the network.

–
Performance graphing allows you to select and examine changes in network performance metrics. You can select, display, and chart network performance data in real time.

•Clickable information in notification messages—Includes context-sensitive links to more detailed information about service outages.

•
Context-sensitive links to other Cisco tools—For managing IP communications implementations.

Operations Manager also does the following:

•Presents service-quality alerts—Uses information from Cisco Unified Service Monitor 1.1, when it is also deployed, to:

–
Display Mean Opinion Scores (MOSs) associated with poor voice quality between pairs of endpoints (Cisco IP phones, Cisco Unity messaging systems, or voice gateways) involved in a call and other associated details about the voice-quality problem.

–Enable you to perform a probable path trace between the two endpoints and reports on any outages or problems on intermediate nodes in the path.

•
Highlights current connectivity-related and registration-related outages affecting Cisco IP phones in the network—In addition, provides contextual information that enables locating and identifying the IP phones involved.

•Tracks IP communications devices and IP phone inventory—Tracks Cisco IP phone status changes and creates a variety of reports that document move, add, and change operations on Cisco IP phones in the network.

•
Provides real-time notifications—Uses SNMP traps, syslog notifications, and e-mail to report the status of the network being monitored to a higher-level entity (typically, to a manager of managers).

On top of this CUOM we have CUSSM(services statistics monitor) that provides:

A monitor collects data for a specific managed object, such as a specific voice gateway or Cisco Unified Communications Manager (Unified Communications Manager). For each managed object, there can be more than one monitor, each collecting a different type of data. For example, for a specific Unified Communications Manager, there will be two monitors on the Operations Manager system:

•  Unified CM Performance Monitor—Collects statistics about the calls handled through Unified CM and the voice gateways and hardware and software conference resources that are registered with Unified CM. •  System Utilization for Unified CM Monitor—Collects data about the system on which the Unified Communications Manager resides.

For each specific managed object, SSM agents create one monitor for each associated monitor type. SSM agents coordinate polling for data and delivery of data to Service Statistics Manager.

macnugetz · Answer

A little more data would help here.  Could you provide a little more detail on the 'great stuff' that CUOM is doing for you?  What are the specific business problems you're trying to solve?